Nvidia in Talks to Buy AI Platform Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to multiple reports, in a deal that would give the world's dominant AI chipmaker control of one of the software layers where much of the industry's open-source model development actually happens. Hugging Face is often described as the "GitHub of AI": a repository developers use to find, share, and deploy machine learning models and datasets.

The reported price is nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation Hugging Face carried in its 2023 funding round, a round Nvidia itself took part in alongside Google and Salesforce. Nvidia had reportedly offered around $500 million for a stake valuing the company at $7 billion earlier this year, an offer Hugging Face turned down. Against Hugging Face's estimated $150 million in annual revenue, the new price works out to roughly 86 times sales.

If completed, the deal would surpass Nvidia's $6.9 billion purchase of networking company Mellanox in 2020 as its largest acquisition to date, and would mark a shift in strategy for a company that built its trillion-dollar valuation primarily by selling graphics processors. As of the most recent reporting, the agreement had not been formally signed or announced by either company.